Odete works between performance, text, visual arts and music. Her work is obsessed with historiographical writing, using erotics and paranoia as two somatic ways of relating to the archival materials. She writes through her body, speculating biographies of historical characters through epidermic pleasures: fashion, personality, presence, fragrance, grace, sensibility. She claims to be a bastard daughter of Lucifer, descending from the medieval practice of satanic pacts to alter one’s gendered body. Lately she has been researching and working around building connection points between “effeminate” histories, from the baroque Castrati to the 19th century dandies.

For her residency at L’Abri, Odete wishes to develop research centred on nationalism, understood as a set of practices for producing and transmitting collective narratives: ways of archiving, documenting, tracing origins, and of contributing to the construction of collective imaginaries.

This research builds on her artistic journey, characterised by a sustained interest in forms of historical narration, processes of memory and mechanisms of cultural transmission. More recently, her practice has shifted towards theatre, seen as a space for the embodied reinterpretation of narratives and bodies within history. The residency therefore marks a step towards consciously reconnecting with her roots in theatre, in dialogue with her performative and transdisciplinary explorations.

At the same time, Odete is going through a phase of conceptual transition, which she describes as becoming an archaeologist. She seeks to connect archaeology and the arts by exploring the methods, temporalities and imaginaries inherent in archaeological research as tools for artistic creation.

Within this framework, she also wishes to conduct specific research into Swiss traditions, approaching them as cultural and symbolic constructs, and to develop a form of writing that examines their historical strata, modes of transmission and fictional potential.